webbookblog

The support team have asked me to put together some flowchart questions and answers for diagnosing and solving common problems folk have with the webbook. I figured it would be best to post them here to help people solve their own problems and chip in with corrections and other suggestions

I keep getting prompted for a keyring password when connecting to my wireless network

Something is wrong with your gnome keyring file, try deleting the keyring file. Open a terminal and type rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring

My webbook shows the Ubuntu logo on bootup but then goes to a black screen

This has happened to a few people, I am not sure why.

When precisely does it go black? Before login or after login? Do you hear the drums at the login page and the startup sound after the login page?

Try plugging in an external monitor and see if that works (obviously not a solution, but it would tell us something about what is going on) if the external monitor works, what resolution is it running at? 1024×768 or 1024×600?

Go to the recovery root shell from the grub menu and edit or replace the xorg.conf file.

cd /etc/X11
sudo mv xorg.conf xorg.broken
sudo wget http://webbookblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/xorg.conf

If that fixes things then I would be quite interested in seeing what the xorg.broken file looks like.

I can’t connect to my mobile broadband connection

What dongle are you using? The E160 does not work so well on Hardy Heron, but it does work much better on Intrepid.

What network?

Prepay or Pay as you go?

If it is pay as you go do you have any credit? (try browsing to three.co.uk, if that is the only site that works then you need a topup)

Have you upgraded to Wader 2.3? Open the mobile broadband application and go to help-about and look at the version number. If it is not 2.3 then do an update and restart the webbook.

Check the profile. If you have connected to a different network in the past it is probably using the wrong profile and trying to roam onto a network for which you don’t have roaming privileges. You should never roam on mobile broadband, if you are abroad buy a local pre-pay SIM card – make sure the thousand pound bills happen to other people. The only exception to this is if you have a Three SIM card you can roam onto Orange GPRS as three don’t have their own GPRS network)

If you do have the wrong profile simply delete it and try to connect, it will pop up a new profile with all the correct details filled in.

For more in depth diagnosis start the mobile broadband client and open a terminal window. Type tail -f /tmp/wader.log now plug in the dongle and watch the messages go by as you connect. The messages do actually mean something although they can be a bit cryptic. If someone has an interesting connection issue I would want to see the contents of /tmp/wader.log.

Please totally ignore and do not use the Windows drivers that are on the pseudo CDROM on the dongle. The installer might sort of run under WINE, but it is not going to connect or do anything productive. Just use the Wader mobile broadband client.

Gcompris doesn’t work

start it with alt-F2 gcompris -x we need to get a patch out to fix this.

I have messed up lots of things

Deleting your home directory and starting again might fix things if you have got corrupted firefox/thunderbird/gnome profiles (you can delete them individually, but it can be simplest to just start again)

I have totally hosed my webbook/I accidentally bought one with XP on it

Ask for a USB webbook Linux restore wristvault. This is a 1GB USB drive with a partition image of a clean webbook build. You need to go into the BIOS to change the hard drive order to boot from it, then back into the BIOS when it is finished to re-enable the SATA hard drive.

So what other FAQs should I add to this list? Any problems I have missed?

In your Firefox bookmarks bar you will probably have noticed the Latest Headlines menu. This menu updates itself automatically from the BBC website so it always shows the latest stories. This isn’t some special trick just for the BBC. You can add a “latest headlines” button for pretty much any website, including this one and it is really easy to do. Just look out for this symbol in the URL bar when you visit a website. If it lights up then that means the website has what is called an “RSS feed”.

Click the feed symbol and you will see a list of the headlines and a “Subscribe Now” button. Click this and you can then choose whether to add the feed to your bookmarks menu or to the bookmarks toolbar (where the BBC feed is)

Now you can quickly check to see if there are any new articles on your favorite sites without having to open them up. This is particularly handy when using a broadband dongle because it uses much less data to check the feed than to open up a site full of pictures.